The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

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Well, yesterday’s Facebook post certainly blew up today, and it looks like Facebook is currently preparing an official response. In the meantime, a Facebook rep has written to the Industry Standard to emphasize that all rights are subject to your privacy settings, so even if they don’t expire when you close your account, they’ll still be subject to whatever restrictions you had when the account was active. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has also posted a more philosophical response on the Facebook blog saying that while the new Terms of Service are “overly formal,” they’re only meant to give Facebook the legal ability to enable content sharing among users.

ListPic, a tool that was like Google Image Search for Craigslist, has been blocked and people are freaking out. With good reason, too. ListPic made craigslist easy to navigate for those of us who like pictures better than words when we shop.

Uh oh. Another obstacle to hurtle over in trying to cancel your Sprint Account for hiking text message rates before their October 31st deadline. Reader Drew wrote us in, informing us that his cancellation was shot down:

Seems like just about everyone wrote us over the weekend to tell us just how wide Verizon was stretching the starfish of all its Unlimited Wireless Broadband customers. So let’s give ’em a shout-out for thinking of us! Thanks, jpac, Travis, Jeff, Uncle Bob and Sarlac, to name only a few!

Although several hundred 14 year old boys lose their virginity to portly displaced man-children pretending to be women in AOL’s chat rooms every day, AOL has bigger fish to fry: the sleazy, nefarious hug. Or “((Hugs))” as it is known in AOL chat parlance, where ‘Hugs’ is replaced with the name of the recipient.